city_guides_sf_civic_center_tourfandomcom-20200216-history
Old City Hall
"The first 'city hall,' before 1840 was an office in a house, or the back room of a hotel which was moved around a lot because of fires and political corruption. By 1869, after a severe earthquake and with a constant influx of people, anyone with a stake in the future of San Francisco wanted to build a spectacular metropolis. So of course they needed a grand city hall. The new city hall was designed as a complex of buildings to be built on a triangular park, the former site of an old cemetery. The state appropriated the land and auctioned off portions of the property--the scheme was to raise a million and a half dollars for construction costs, and get it built in three years. Construction began in 1870, was finished 27 years later, in 1897, and cost six million dollars. Just nine years later it was all but destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. It was a nineteenth-century thing; you give a contract to friends, or friends of friends. With seven chief architects, over twenty-seven years there was ineptitude after ineptitude. The materials were compromised; even the cast bricks were rumored to be shoddy. Fireplaces were built and later heating systems were installed. There were major sewage problems, the place was said to stink all the time. The floors didn't match up, chimneys didn't draw so the rooms were smokey, it was a mess. . . . The design was a Second Empire, French-style emerging in the 1860s in Paris when the monarchy was restored and Napoleon III was in power. Ironically, in 1871 during the Paris Commune, which was in part a rebellion against the monarchy, much of Paris burned. So oddly, this was the architectural style, the democratic ideal adopted for government buildings throughout America. . . . The property which had been sold to raise money remained empty for years and became sort of impromptu demonstration areas--I don't think they had a strong sense of 'public space' at that time. So these lots became the forerunner of the plaza, I guess you could say. They were called the sand lots where workers would congregate and often marches started from there, until of course they plopped the Pioneer monument in the middle. . . ." ''--San Francisco City Planner'' I study evolutionary theory, as well as human evolution, and the morphological characteristics of human bone--what it goes through--through time and a lifetime. It was the southeast corner of the Civic Center, the site of the old City Hall where the new library was built. But in the 1840s the entire area was the Yerba Buena cemetery--the city's first graveyard. Supposedly, they had moved the bodies in the 1850s, but it was suspected that some remains might still be found--so when they began the excavation for the library I was called to be on site in case there was an exhumation. We found no whole skeletons but some rib and fibula fragments. We found a lot of hand and finger bones, and teeth--things that slip through the cracks. Every day we would comb through the sand, the wind would blow all night and you'd return and see new exposed bones. We found most of it just north of an in-credible brick sewer--a piece of the old infrastructure still underneath the city. Around it we found a lot of Chinese coins, pipes, and jewelry bits, so I assume it was built by Chinese labor. The artifacts were found in the foundation, you don't know what happened. A lot of the things were personal items. Maybe they belonged to the people who worked at City Hall. . . . from "Going Public: The San Francisco Civic Center" in Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (City Lights: 1998) The two quotes above appear in an article on the Old City Hall at FoundSF, a site that is a good resource for pix. http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Old_City_Hall_of_SF The article includes good pictures of the Old City Hall and a 30-second film of OCH in the aftermath of the earthquake. Here is an article on Marshall Square (the area that was in front of the old City Hall, and today is the intersection of Grove and Hyde) --- http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Marshall_Square This article includes an excellent map from 1904, showing the location and configuration of OCH. Also a useful version of the 1912 plan that became Civic Center. I use both these pix on my tour. Several other good pix in this article, including Pioneer Monument and CC Plaza. Jeremy From a 2012 Chron story: Crews working on a building project in San Francisco's Civic Center have unearthed the massive foundations of the old City Hall, a ghostly reminder of San Francisco's greatest disaster. The imposing old City Hall collapsed in a shower of bricks, stone and steel in the 1906 earthquake. It was the largest municipal building west of Chicago and was so elaborate it took 25 years to build. The City Hall was supposed to be earthquake proof, but it collapsed in seconds after the great quake struck. It had been open for less than 10 years. Its ruins were demolished in 1909, but workers digging under the sidewalk on Hyde Street near Fulton Street for a landscaping project struck something big Sept. 14 - bricks and concrete and steel reinforcing bars. They called archaeologists from the federalGeneral Services Administration, which owns the adjacent former federal building at 50 United Nations Plaza. They looked at old maps and old reports: It was the 1906 City Hall, all right. "We were surprised to see it," said Rebecca Karberg, historic preservation specialist for the GSA. "You really never know what's under the surface." The wreckage of the old City Hall - a grandiose dome 300 feet high held up by the skeletal remains of a building - became a famous symbol of the '06 quake. The wrecked building was widely photographed, and the pictures were sold as postcards. The cornerstone of City Hall was laid on Washington's Birthday, 1872, though site excavation started the year before. It was built on the site of the old Yerba Buena Cemetery, where perhaps as many as 9,000 San Franciscans were buried between 1850 and 1860. "The original 49ers," Karberg called them. Shifting design The site, just off Market Street where the Main Library now stands, was sandy and wet in the winter. There was an underground spring. The original design called for a building in the shape of the letter W, with columns and ornamental towers in the French Second Empire style. Over the years, however, the design was changed more than once. There were big cost overruns and various scandals. It took so long to build, it became a municipal joke: "The new City Hall ruin," it was called. Only a year after its 1897 opening, it was damaged in a minor earthquake, an ominous sign. "It was the proverbial disaster waiting to happen," wrote Stephen Tobriner in "Bracing for Disaster," a book about engineering in earthquake country. Before dawn on April 18, 1906, the Big One struck. Officer E.J. Plume was in the police station in the City Hall basement. He heard the pillars that held up the cornices and the cupola "go cracking with reports like cannon, then falling like thunder." The building "seemed to be reeling like the cabin of a ship in a storm." The officers ran out, but City Hall was otherwise unoccupied. Had it been full of city workers, the death toll would have been huge. After the quake, rumors circulated that contractors who built City Hall had cut corners: The great exterior columns, it was said, were hollow, filled with street sweepings. But a report by architects after the disaster found the construction to have been solid; it was the design that failed. City Hall, they said, had been built "without any of the principles of the steel frame construction having been used." So it was torn down and nearly forgotten. Portions of the cemetery - including graves of early pioneers - were found when the Federal Building at what is now U.N. Plaza was built in 1933; and again the 1990s and 2001, when both a corner of the old City Hall foundation and part of the cemetery were unearthed during construction of the Asian Art Museum and the library. Big surprise But this month's discovery was still a surprise. The General Services Administration is rebuilding the 1933 Federal Building and had evidently not expected to find anything of the area's past. The new findings provide a window into the past and, perhaps, an opportunity to learn something more about construction in earthquake territory. "We enjoy history," said Joanne Grant, an archaeologist. "I'm not from San Francisco, so I have a lot to learn about the history here. But now, we are digging it up." When the architects and historians are finished documenting the ruins of the old City Hall, and the landscaping project is ready to go, the crews will go back to work. "We will bury it all again," Karberg said. Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Images of Old City Hall Old newspaper articles about the old city hall appear on this page Scroll down to "municipal buildings." There is also an article there about the temporary city hall in what is now the Whitcomb hotel. Since that link thingie doesn't work for me, here is the url: http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist1/index0.2.html JEREMY